'Keeper' review: Rossif Sutherland & Tatiana Maslany have cabin fever in Osgood Perkins' folk horror

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Add some bees into the finale and this becomes a prequel that tells us the origins of the hive. And we all know that you have to protect the hive. For now, though, we are keeping up with Keeper, a folk horror set mostly in one house with plenty of spookiness to be expected. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) has been dating Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a doctor, for a year and to celebrate this, they're taking a weekend trip to his cabin. More is revealed about their relationship as different developments test Liz's idea of a romantic, relaxing getaway. A cake needs a taste test, Malcolm's annoying cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his most-likely-sex-trafficked girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss) drop by, Malcolm needs to visit the city real quick because of a work thing, and Liz has strange visions that get increasingly more disturbing. Horrific revelations follow.

On the surface, director Osgood Perkins and screenwriter Nick Lepard have cooked up a fairly common and straightforward horror about people experiencing madness at a cabin in the woods. (The production history explains a lot, although that is mostly irrelevant when it comes to the film's quality.) It's also a relationship drama where you have Liz who isn't exactly looking for commitment, and Malcolm who perhaps isn't the most trustworthy or loyal dude in the first place. There's some interesting friction because Liz is aware of all of this, but both are willing to ignore his flaws for momentary satisfaction or excitement that stems from having a shared secret. As we spend more time in their presence and particularly Liz's headspace, the story begins focusing on gender dynamics, different shades of misogyny, autonomy and eventually some version of karma, which may or may not appear in a mystical form.

Between those two identities, Keeper succeeds way better as a single location slow burn. Maslany is pretty excellent here, meeting the foreboding tone with her rendering of Liz's anxiety and discomfort, and single-handedly keeping you somewhat invested in the story. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox and Perkins do a lot with little in this small space when it comes to composition and staging, often confining Liz in a way that isolates her. Composer Edo Van Breemen adds one or two great musical cues to accentuate said isolation, and the entire final stretch of the movie is a sight to behold thanks to neat FX makeup, Maslany's ferocity and overall sense of malice.

Sadly, Lepard's script is much lousier than the visual storytelling. The thematic exploration is extremely shallow and astonishingly uneven, which makes the narrative feel like a real bore. Sutherland's rigid performance style makes sense towards the end, but Malcolm isn't interesting enough as a character, whilst the writing keeps turning Liz into a fool simply for plot's sake—a deadly sin for any film. The story also comes to a screeching halt whenever Lepard and Perkins decide to dump an egregious amount of badly written exposition. I'd like to say that the ending is worth enduring it all, but one would need to climb several mountains to get there.

What's even worse is that there seems to be a severe lack of passion and urgency to tell this story, even if the images are nice to look at. There's not enough intrigue, not enough juice, as they say. It's nice to hear that artists got jobs and paychecks, especially in this economy, but this trip didn't create any lasting memories and the mystery isn't one that will attract people in the years to come.

Smileys: Ending, Tatiana Maslany

Frowneys: Screenplay, banality, characterisation

Meh-n.

2.0/5

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